Hey everyone! We have decided to move our questions about Ether to this discussion feed as it is much easier to answer your questions about the title directly as well as being a chance to get to know the community. Ask us questios and we will do our best to answer you here!

Hi there! There are no monsters in Ether One, instead we have opted to explore a relationship between the player character and a narrator (there are a few different narrators in the game) rather than direct interaction with NPC's. Thanks for the question :)

Hi @Prom King thanks for the question. We all play a variety of different games over at White Paper Games HQ that range from recent AAA games like Halo 4, Dishonored and Hitman: Absolution to indie darlings like Super Hexagon, Fez, Bastion and Super Meat Boy. From a personal stand point I have recently been sinking hours into Dark Souls on the PC and I love the way that the story is told through the players exploration of the environment and through the mechanics of the game.

We were totally inspired to try out different storytelling in videogames due to our love of tougher and older adventure games and a belief that puzzles and narrative can be balanced together to tell a story. We really wanted to explore this idea that by building the story and game play up at the same time that puzzles, mechanics and narrative can all balance out the game in order to tell a rich and focused story. In order to do this we felt that it was important after setting the scene and dictating objective that the player had freedom to explore through the role of a restorer and piece together the story themselves. We provide everything - but the players participation is the catalyst for this story to happen - why not build that in to the game structure? So we did :)

i dont want to ask something specific, its a must buy game for me i have allready decided about that (especially after reading your interview) ,i just wonder what your chances are to get greenlit? i mean whats your position now on top100

Thanks for the kind words gusgreco - currently we are close to being in the top 100 but not quite there. We were a little late to Greenlight compared to most top 100 games but are always gaining votes (although more faves would help). On top of steam the game will obviously be released through a variety of distribution service which have already been agreed upon.

I've been using Unreal for 6-7 years now so I'm pretty comfortable. Rest of the team have been using it at least 3-4 years so its not new. The whole working in a larger team was definitely a bit more challenging but UDK has a lot of cool tools to make that process easier. Whether it be streaming levels that multiple people can work on to different asset packages and even the new integration with Perforce makes things super easy!

I would say you definitely need to stay on track with who's working in what content file whether it be a package or level - things can get quickly over written. If you don't have subversion then Dropbox is totally fine - just check what dates files were updated and if you don't have that file then you update it. Also if everyone updates their work at the end of the day makes things simpler. I would also say that if you have separate packages for art, narrative, scripting, audio etc etc then no one is going to be conflicting packages (or even if you're working on your own makes things easier to find!)

Playtesting is a constant process, mainly internal testers at the moment and we have quite a few friends that are QA testers in the industry so they've been helping us out a lot. We will be opening the game up to a wider audience of testing when its more finalised and we're happy with the flow of the game. Its quite hard to have external testing because if any story is missing, or audio isnt present - or even art assets to use with a puzzle, its very hard for players to get the full experience. So we're always saying - oh, imagine this area is flooded, or there will be writing on this wall. Etc etc. Because of how Ether is set up its a little harder to just pick up and play and get a full idea about it at this stage. Now that we're getting well underway with a complete game though, its becoming much easier to just let people play!

Can this be ported to Linux? The latest UE was apparently ported to Linux this year, please do! (saw this on Kotaku, looks brill!)

We would love to bring Ether One to Linux - we are currently using UDK and will need to do further research to see compatibility with the platform. Keep posted for more news regarding this and thanks for the question.

First, how big of a game is it, lengthwise? Not that it matters, I'm gonna get it the second I can, but I'm just curious.

Second, how difficult do you think it is? Is it full of tough puzzles, or is it mostly about the story and the ride?

Lastly...will it be difficult to run? My computer's not all that great, I need a new video card, so I'd just like to know if I'm going to have trouble running it or if I'll be able to get it to work.

Thanks! Your game looks seriously amazing, I can't wait to get my hands on it and play it. If I can't run it, I'll get it and play on my friend's computer. :P Thanks for being awesome! I really, really hope it gets greenlit.

We're not 100% how long the game will be lengthwise - we're still chopping bits that aren't good enough and adding bits that we think will be awesome - don;t want to say definitively until its done but it's around the 5hr mark at the moment although I'm confident we'll hit 7+ hrs! :)

Difficulty - I very much ranges. The way we've designed it is so that it has multiple levels of complexity puzzle wise. The game has a linear-ish feel to it but you can choose multiple paths on how to tackle the level - You also don't need to solve any puzzles if you don't wish. There arent any "now you have to solve this puzzle to get further" - two reasons for this. One was so that we could have some very hard puzzles in there and allow people to mull over them for a while scratching their heads but it also allowed for people not to get frustrated with difficulty and turn off. However solving these harder puzzles will bring more reward and sense of achievement in the game. Long story short - we don't like to give people hints on how to solve our game ;)

Performance wise - we're unsure at the moment on the specifics. But we are building it in the UDK version of Unreal Technology, so whatever guidelines they give on their website - I'm sure they will be pretty similar. I've linked the page you would be wanting to check out for performance things in UDK:http://www.unrealengine.com/udk/documentation/readme/

We're really humbled by your question Supertails and we love how into our game you are! Thanks for the support and we hope your PC is up to running the game! :)

TsaebehT, apologies about the late reply - just wanted to check on some of the technical stuff before I replied :)

So basically our programmer Dave Smith said that since the game is built on Unreal Development Kit, it supports RealD 3D and Nvidia 3D Vision. We don't currently own any of the hardware required to test the 3D features, but if we get a chance we'd love to try and play around with it and see what we can come up with.

Ether One has already been set up with full support for the Xbox 360 Controller for Windows. We are going to consider more contoller options since everyone likes a different pad (I'm a PS3 man myself ;) ) But if UDK supports it - we'll sort it out!

Also, rumble support is definitely coming for the Xbox 360 Controller!

Cheers for the interest! Hope that helps answer some of your (challenging!) technical questions ;)